It will appear hereafter, in treating of reasoning, how much the theory of that intellectual process has been vitiated by the influence of these erroneous notions, and by the habit which they exemplify of assimilating all the operations of the human understanding which have truth for their object, to processes of mere classification and naming. Unfortunately, the minds which have been entangled in this net are precisely those which have escaped the other cardinal error commented upon in the beginning of the present chapter. Since the revolution which dislodged Aristotle from the schools, logicians may almost be divided into those who have looked upon reasoning as essentially an affair of Ideas, and those who have looked upon it as essentially an affair of Names.
Although, however, Hobbes's theory of Predication, according to the well-known remark of Leibnitz, and the avowal of Hobbes himself,[1]renders truth and falsity completely arbitrary, with no standard but the will of men, it must not be concluded that either Hobbes, or any of the other thinkers who have in the main agreed with him, did in fact consider the distinction between truth and error as less real, or attached less importance to it, than other people. To suppose that they did so would argue total unacquaintance with their other speculations. But this shows how little hold their doctrine possessed over their own minds. No person, at bottom, ever imagined that there was nothing more in truth than propriety of expression; than using language in conformity to a previous convention. When the inquiry was brought down from generals to a particular case, it has always been acknowledged that there is a distinction between verbal and real questions; that some false propositions are uttered from ignorance of the meaning of words, but that in others the source of the error is a misapprehension of things; that a person who has not the use of language at all may form propositions mentally, and that they may be untrue—that is, he may believe as matters of fact what are not really so. This last admission can not be made in stronger terms than it is by Hobbes himself,[2] though he will not allow such erroneous belief to be called falsity, but only error. And he has himself laid down, in other places, doctrines in which the true theory of predication is by implication contained. He distinctly
- ↑ "From hence also this may be deduced, that the first truths were arbitrarily made by those that first of all imposed names upon things, or received them from the imposition of others. For it is true (for example) that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both these names on the same thing."—Computation or Logic, chap. iii., sect. 8.
- ↑ "Men are subject to err not only in affirming and denying, but also in perception, and in silent cogitation. . . . Tacit errors, or the errors of sense and cogitation, are made by passing from one imagination to the imagination of another different thing; or by feigning that to be past, or future, which never was, nor ever shall be; as when by seeing the image of the sun in water, we imagine the sun itself to be there; or by seeing swords, that there has been, or shall be, fighting, because it used to be so for the most part; or when from promises we feign the mind of the promiser to be such and such; or, lastly, when from any sign we vainly imagine something to be signified which is not. And errors of this sort are common to all things that have sense."—Computation or Logic, chap. v., sect. 1.
the word Class has two meanings; "the class definite, and the class indefinite. The class definite is an enumeration of actual individuals, as the Peers of the Realm, the oceans of the globe, the known planets. . . . The class indefinite is unenumerated. Such classes are stars, planets, gold-bearing rocks, men, poets, virtuous. . . . In this last acceptation of the word, class name and general name are identical. The class name denotes an indefinite number of individuals, and connotes the points of community or likeness."
The theory controverted in the text, tacitly supposes all classes to be definite. I have assumed them to be indefinite; because, for the purposes of Logic, definite classes, as such, are almost useless; though often serviceable as means of abridged expression. (Vide infra, book iii., chap. ii.)
